Amazon wants customers to be able to leave their wallets at home and still go shopping, as long as they have their smartphones on hand.

The online retail giant is opening up a brick-and-mortar store in Seattle called Amazon Go, and the store uses a mix of sensors and computer learning to track what items customers pick up and to automatically add them to their Amazon accounts.

Amazon identifies each customer using a QR code, which individuals scan before entering the store. The store offers groceries, ready-made food, and Amazon meal kits. Currently, Amazon Go is only accessible to the company’s employees, but Amazon says it will open its doors to the public in early 2017.

Users who need to make sure they can get access to files stored in Dropbox while they’re on the go and away from the web have a new feature to help with that. The company announced Tuesday that users of its mobile apps will soon be able to save files locally for use offline.

It’s a move by the cloud storage company to better compete with the other players in the cloud storage space, and provide users with functionality that will help them be more productive when they’re on planes, out in low-connectivity areas or just want to save their cellular data quota for other purposes.

Here’s how it works: users select a file or folder in the Dropbox app, tap “Make Available Offline,” then wait for the app to download the requested files. After that, those files will be available for viewing, even if the phone or tablet storing them is without a connection to the web.

A month before Apple is expected to enforce stricter security requirements for app communications in iOS, enterprise developers don’t seem ready to embrace them, a new study shows.

The study was performed by security firm Appthority on the most common 200 apps installed on iOS devices in enterprise environments. The researchers looked at how well these apps conform to Apple’s App Transport Security (ATS) requirements.

ATS was first introduced and was enabled by default in iOS 9. It forces all apps to communicate with Internet servers using encrypted HTTPS (HTTP over SSL/TLS) connections and ensures that only industry-standard encryption protocols and ciphers without known weaknesses are used. For example, SSL version 3 is not allowed and neither is the RC4 stream cipher, due to known vulnerabilities.

Amazon.com is still figuring out how to use robots to fill store shelves, but it's about done with clerks. Next year, the company will open a convenience store in Seattle where shoppers can walk in, take what they want -- and leave.

The Amazon Go store is on the corner of 7th Avenue and Blanchard Street in Seattle, in the heart of Amazon's new campus development and a few blocks from the company's headquarters.

Amazon wants people to walk in to the store and then just walk out with what they want.

It's not giving the goods away, though.

To figure out who to charge, and how much, Amazon will identify shoppers by scanning QR codes on their phones as they walk in, and use sensors and computer vision technology to determine which items they take.

On Wednesday, Apple indicated that it was actively working to identify and block any further spam invites from hitting your iCloud Calendar. Last week, people started receiving suspicious spam invites on iOS and macOS alerting them of special sales for Ugg boots or Ray-Ban sunglasses.

The spammers were able to exploit an iCloud feature that uses email data to pop-up as Calendar notifications. If the spam invites were set as recurring events, the notifications would surface every day.

Netflix on a flight? No way, you say? The idea has seemed out of reach for years, because Netflix doesn’t let its U.S. subscribers download video for offline viewing.

However, rumors suggest customers in countries with unreliable broadband may soon get the feature. Meanwhile, in-flight Wi-Fi provider Gogo is working to upgrade the speed of its service on airplanes to support streaming video. Other competitors, including Viasat, offer fast, video-friendly service via satellite. And Amazon Prime members can download some Prime video to their mobile devices for offline use

Free-to-play games often look appealing, but it’s difficult to know at a glance whether the business model is insidious and fun ruining, or reasonable and worth pumping a few bucks into. With Freemium Field Test, we’ll take a recent free-to-play iOS game, put it through its paces, and let you know if it’s really worth your time (and money).

“Walking simulator” is a term used to deride games like Gone Home, Dear Esther, and Firewatch—all critically acclaimed, first-person experiences that get slammed by some gaming aficionados for focusing on storytelling over complex interactions. The Trail isn’t exactly like those games, but it sure is all about walking: you’ll stroll ahead on a fixed path from one camp to the next, attempting to survive the trek and ultimately make it to the big city.

These days, keeping up with games can be a full-time job. So how do you separate the signal from the noise, the wheat from the chaff, the Temple Runs from the Temple Jumps? Allow us to help by regularly selecting a game You Should Play.

While playing RunGunJumpGun on my iPhone, I have scoffed loudly on multiple occasions, yelled “Are you serious?” at least a couple times, and may have elbowed a pillow or two. You might take these reactions for disgust or irritation, but quite the opposite is true: I’m crazy about the game, and I am deeply invested.

Free-to-play games often look appealing, but it’s difficult to know at a glance whether the business model is insidious and fun ruining, or reasonable and worth pumping a few bucks into. With Freemium Field Test, we’ll take a recent free-to-play iOS game, put it through its paces, and let you know if it’s really worth your time (and money).

Gameloft’s Asphalt racing series plodded along for nearly a decade, releasing several entries that were fine but never quite great—and then Asphalt 8: Airborne bucked that trend to a rather startling degree. The 2013 release finally launched the series into the upper echelon of mobile racers, delivering the best arcade driving experience on iPhone and iPad, plus it sold for only $1 at launch. Just a couple months later, it was turned into a free-to-play game.

Instagram Stories started a bit inauspiciously as a very obvious Snapchat Stories clone. But three months in and it’s clearly a success: 100 million people use Stories every day to check their friends’ disappearing photos or add their own. Now the Facebook-owned photo-sharing network is adding a live video feature to Stories, so you can broadcast your life for up to an hour at a time.

These days, keeping up with games can be a full-time job. So how do you separate the signal from the noise, the wheat from the chaff, the Temple Runs from the Temple Jumps? Allow us to help by regularly selecting a game You Should Play.

Put your detective skills to the test with Agatha Christie: The ABC Murders—a clever point-and-tap mystery adventure that seamlessly moves you through the classic murder novel in the shoes of Christie’s famous protagonist, Hercule Poirot.

This week’s roundup of apps includes significant updates to some of your favorite iPhone and iPad applications. Read on!

Any.do

One of our favorite taskmaster apps has long been Any.do (freemium, iPhone and iPad). Version 4.0 launched this week with two nifty features: First, it integrates a calendar so you can see your events and your tasks in one app. Second, it adds the “Any.do Assistant,” a Siri-like feature that tries to accomplish some of your tasks—like shopping for your spouse’s birthday gift—for you. Will it work? This feature is still in beta, but you can sign up for access right now over on Any.do’s site.

f you’ve not yet used or created any IFTTT “recipes,” the holiday season is as good a time as any to start. After all, who wants to take valuable attention away from a New Year’s Eve celebration to post a greeting to your social media followers?

If you’ve never heard of IFTTT, it stands for “If This, Then That.” And it’s a free service that connects other services and invokes automated actions, such as auto backup of your Instagram photos to Google Drive. Automated IFTTT tasks used to be called “recipes,” but they are now referred to as “applets.” IFTTT says the new applets offer more functionality than recipes and developers can reportedly integrate them into their products more easily.

In a move that many of its users have been eagerly waiting for, WhatsApp is adding video calling to its apps. The Facebook-owned company says the new feature is rolling out worldwide in the coming days. WhatsApp’s more than one billion users will be able to use the new feature on Android, iPhone, and even Windows Phone devices (we presume that means Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 10 Mobile).

These days, keeping up with games can be a full-time job. So how do you separate the signal from the noise, the wheat from the chaff, the Temple Runs from the Temple Jumps? Allow us to help by regularly selecting a game You Should Play.

Swedish studio Mediocre has become one of my favorite mobile game makers thanks to a pair of seriously addictive original experiences: Smash Hit is a dazzling endless glass-shattering arcade affair, while Does Not Commute is an unexpectedly hilarious game about routing traffic through cities. Despite being very different games, both feature a very similar (and smart) free-to-play model.

This week’s roundup includes an app that reproduces the sounds of a famous 1970s synthesizer. Read on!

Arp Oddyssei

Arp Oddyssei ($20, iPhone and iPad) is an app built for a particular kind of music nerd. Love the sound of the 1972 ARP Odyssey analog synthesizer? (Here’s a demo on YouTube.) This app is a “complete recreation” of that machine and the groovy future sounds it made—plus a few new effects have been added, thanks to the miracle of 21st century technology.

Instagram’s addition of Snapchat-style Stories has proven to be a welcome new feature—according to Instagram’s data, more than 100 million people create Stories every day. So it’s no surprise that Instagram is building up Stories even more: On Thursday, the app rolled out an update that adds Boomerang compatibility, mentions, and links to Instagram Stories.

Boomerang is a standalone tool built by Instagram that lets you create a quick video that loops forward and backward—perfect for sharing in your main feed, but it’ll make for a fun story component as well. Select that option from your stories camera to capture a Boomerang clip. (You have to have the Boomerang app installed to use this feature.)

“Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” some guy told his son once in a play. It’s good advice—if someone floats you a few dollars, you should pay them back right away, before you forget. Now PayPal users can settle up without even launching the app, sending payments to friends via Siri in iOS 10.

Version 6.7 of PayPal’s iOS app lets users both send and request money with Siri commands. The app joins Square Cash and Monzo in adding Siri support for sending and receiving payments.

Pinterest is full of inspiration, from recipes to furniture hacks to costume ideas. But while some things look good in photos, they don’t always turn out successfully in real life. There are a slew of blogs devoted to documenting disastrous Pinterest projects (most of which are incredibly hilarious). But you might see fewer fails thanks to Pinterest’s new pin tips feature.

Pinterest is rolling out an update to its iOS app on Thursday that lets you see which of your fellow pinners have tried a project. More importantly, it lets anyone add feedback, photos, and tips on how to pull off a Pinterest experiment so it doesn’t go horrible awry.

The Google Photos tie-in means you can import and export photos from Google’s app to Photoshop Express for quick editing and sharing. Photoshop Express already supports Adobe’s Creative Cloud, Dropbox, Facebook, and the iOS Camera Roll, so Google Photos is a welcome addition.

Now you can make collages, a popular feature in many photo-editing apps, in Photoshop Express. The new intelligent layout tool populate your images in a carousel of collage options in one tap so you can see what they’ll look like in a variety of formats. A style transfer automation tool takes the time out of editing your collage photos, although you can still manually edit each image in the collage by tapping and adjusting it.

These days, keeping up with games can be a full-time job. So how do you separate the signal from the noise, the wheat from the chaff, the Temple Runs from the Temple Jumps? Allow us to help by regularly selecting a game You Should Play.

If you’re looking for relief from the onslaught of half-baked mobile games in the App Store—I’m talking about all those time-based freemium titles that beg you to nag your Facebook friends for extra credits—Samorost 3 is exactly what you need.

Facebook users will be able to record smartphone videos that ape the style of famous artworks with a new feature unveiled Tuesday. Using a technique called style transfer, the feature takes live video and turns it into something that resembles the work of Van Gogh, Picasso and other artists.

That effect is probably familiar to people who have used the app Prisma, which uses similar techniques to change the look of photos. Prisma’s app can’t perform live filtering, and some filters require a connection to the internet. Facebook’s system can work offline and render live.

Just in time for the holiday shopping season, the iOS App Store is seeing a deluge of fake shopping apps branding themselves with designer names in hopes of trapping gullible buyers. Apple is now stepping in to remove the counterfeit apps, which are sneaking in by changing the content after Apple’s approval or by resubmitting apps under different names and credentials after being outed as fraudulent.

After reports of apps using reputable companies’ names to shill their fake wares in the App Store surfaced in the New York Times and New York Post, Apple removed hundreds of offenders. But hucksters keep coming back: The Times found that an app called Overstock Inc. was trying to convince shoppers that it was Overstock.com by selling clothes and Ugg boots. Apple killed the app, only to see it return the next day, because sketchy developers are finding new ways to bypass the company’s traditionally tough app review process.

This week’s roundup features games with dark origins, games that reimagine pinball, and games that teach you how to code. Read on!

60db

You know all those news apps that mix and aggregate stories from a variety of sources? 60db (free) is the same thing, only it works with “short-form audio stories”—stuff you might hear on NPR during its news programming—to present you with your own custom news radio.

These days, keeping up with games can be a full-time job. So how do you separate the signal from the noise, the wheat from the chaff, the Temple Runs from the Temple Jumps? Allow us to help by regularly selecting a game You Should Play.

Games are still primarily thought of as being solely for fun, and that’s true in most cases. We play games for excitement and escapism; to kill time or experience something we couldn’t physically (or financially) undertake in real life. But video games can be much more than playthings and diversions: interactive entertainment can help convey a real-life experience that you’ll hope against hope to never suffer for yourself.

We’re still unpacking the “Hello again” event, with plenty of opinions on the TV app that’s coming in December, but Susie got to demo a little in the hands-on area. Then we dig into the MacBook Pro, discussing the reason behind its 16GB RAM ceiling, the awkward transition to USB-C and Thunderbolt 3, and Susie’s hands-on experience in which her hands were moving just too quickly for QuickType to keep up.

Next week we’ll be able to discuss our full review of the 13-inch MacBook Pro with function keys, and our reviews of the Touch Bar models should come out just after the podcast. Stay tuned!

A giant social network buying a popular service and then killing it is pretty common. But a giant social network buying a popular service and then making its best features totally free? That’s almost unheard of. But just two months after Pinterest bought Instapaper, the company is doing away with the read-it-later app’s subscription costs. Its premium tier is now totally free.

Pinterest banished ads from Instapaper on the web and made premium features like unlimited notes and speed-reading, full-text search for all articles, text-to-speech playlists, and more available to all users, not just paying ones.

Free-to-play games often look appealing, but it’s difficult to know at a glance whether the business model is insidious and fun ruining, or reasonable and worth pumping a few bucks into. With Freemium Field Test, we’ll take a recent free-to-play iOS game, put it through its paces, and let you know if it’s really worth your time (and money).

Plants vs. Zombies is one of the all-time great iOS and Mac games, putting a colorful and approachable spin on the oft-hardcore tower defense strategy genre—and while the free-to-play shift muddled the impact of sequel Plants vs. Zombies 2 just a bit, it remained a pretty essential mobile pick.